Francisco Goya's Junta of the Philippines c1815...Modernity: its Bareness, Staginess, and Deliberate Cultivation of Mystery

 Robert Hughes writes in his book "Goya", 2003:

"... It was the largest picture he ever made—some eight feet by ten—and one of the stranger productions of his long career: the grandfather of all boardroom portraits, crowded with dozens of figures set in a gloomy interior. It was intended to commemorate the patronage extended to the Junta de la Real Companñía de Filipinas by Fernando VII, who made an unexpected visit to the general session of the company’s board that was held on March 30, 1815, attended by fifty-one members and shareholders. Nothing seems to have happened or been resolved at this session; it was merely ceremonial, and dull ceremony at that. Fernando stayed only an hour and a half. However, his appearance at the meeting was meant to affirm his belief in the world designs of Spain and the continuation of its empire. This faith was, needless to add, vain. It was a collective delusion of the royalist right, believed in only by Fernando and his camarilla of incompetent advisers. The Spanish economy had been completely ruined by the war, and though the Royal Company of the Philippines had once been intended as a powerful instrument of trade and control like the British East India Company, it was now so unprofitable and useless that it was hardly more than decorative. Thus Fernando’s appearance was a futile gesture of belief in a hollow empire; a little more than eighty years later, Spain would lose its Philippine empire when the cannon of Commodore Dewey sent its whole navy to the bottom of Manila Bay.

For anyone who has had to endure a full shareholders’ meeting of a large modern corporation, its mood is instantly recognizable. No figure gets real precedence over any other; the king is at the center of the table on the dais, but he and his flanking officials are pushed into the background, and the only emphasis he gets is a small heightening of color in his costume—plus his location at the vanishing point of the perspective. The most prominent single zone in the painting is a rectangle of sunlit, inlaid floor. It is a crowded composition that speaks, paradoxically, of emptiness and solitude; an image of droning discussion that conveys only a sense of silence; a theatrical presentation—for this vast room resembles a stage on which all action has stopped and nothing happens, with light streaming in from the wings on the right, a light that seems almost unearthly in contrast to the gloom of the chamber. Yet the obvious antecedent of this morbid space, with its large orthogonal divisions of ceiling and floor, lies right at the heart of Spanish painting in the “Golden Century,” in the work of the artist whom Goya admired to the point of filial piety: the big, brown, receding chamber in which Velázquez set the figures of Las meninas.

So Junta of the Philippines looks both backward and forward. Backward because of its enormous size, its sense of monumental occasion, and its clear invocation of Velázquez. But forward, too, because of what one could fairly call its incipient modernity: its bareness, staginess, and deliberate cultivation of mystery in the middle of what, by rights, should have been a straightforward narrative of an official event. One hesitates to invoke the word “Surrealist,” and yet there is something about the whole tone of the painting that suggests if not Surrealism iself, then certainly the aching distances and enigmatic half-events of its precursor, the pittura metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico."

 

 

Fernández-Armesto explains in his new book 'How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400 Year History':

 

"The work belongs in the tradition of what might be called Spanish ‘anti-portraiture’, from Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ to Goya’s own devastatingly candid royal family group, ‘Familia de Carlos IV’, moral as well as physical delineations of regal vacuity. King Ferdinand VII appears amid the company’s directors, who, enveloped in shadow, seem to ignore him while they talk among themselves, apparently clueless as to why they are there or whether it matters."